The moon sat over the water allows Canaletto to paint bright reflections, forming another triangle for the eye to follow: from the foreground to the woman staring out at the viewer beneath the tenting. Pagina ufficiale del Gruppo Campanari di San Giorgio, nati ufficialmente il 7 aprile 2012, sabato di Pasqua. It is almost the only surviving building of its time in the immediate area. New buildings to the south block the view out towards San Giorgio in Alga. Where is the painter’s viewpoint located? The moon is just past full, but it’s setting too far south. What did we find? The Grand Canal in Venice from Palazzo Flangini to Campo... Piazza San Marco with the Basilica, Venice, Venice - The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore, View of the Giudecca Canal and the Zattere, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice from Grand Canal, Grand Canal: Looking North from Near the Rialto Bridge. No moon appears in the sketches. Tomorrow, July 29, is the Festa di Santa Marta, one of the less well-known Venetian festivals and one that is no longer celebrated in a part of the city that is perhaps the most changed since Canaletto’s day. [2] Giovanni Mariacher, Recenti restauri a Cà Rezzonico Dipinti di Gaspare ed Antonio Diziani in Arte veneta, V (1951), pp. It’s hard to identify a plausible location that would provide this angle of view onto the buildings. As it is shown, the moon over San Giorgio in Alga forms strong compositional triangles to lead the eye through the painting, along the row of buildings from the right, towards San Giorgio, and up to the moon. 173–176, [3] Erich Schleier in Venedigs Ruhm in Norden, Forum des Landesmuseums Hannover 1991–1992, pp. If so, then the perspective is extremely compressed or distorted. On a visit to Venice last year, we thought it would be fun to visit the Santa Marta area and see what remains of the views shown in the painting. There are no constellations that I can confidently identify, except perhaps for one. Buildings to the left, festivalgoers on the banks and in the boats, an island offshore in the mid-ground, and a full moon. While the moon phase and direction can easily be checked on a map, we thought it would be fun to show the view towards San Giorgio using augmented reality to simulate how the moon would have appeared in the 1750s and 1760s. If so, then it seems quite possible that Canaletto’s depiction of a full moon, rather than being inspired by an actual observed event, is, in addition to its use as a light source and compositional aid, simply a nod to Diziani’s prototype. Contact Masseria Palazzi on Messenger. But the deeper I dig, the less probable the whole notion seems. Vivila a ilmaredentro! 1759 fares little better: the sun has not yet set when a waxing crescent moon is over San Giorgio. Another candidate for astronomical dating, perhaps? Erich Schleier, whose research established the “not before” 1758 date that is generally applied to Canaletto’s paintings for Sigismund Streit, suggests[3] that Streit may have been inspired to commission Canaletto to paint the Festa di Santa Marta on account of having seen Diziani’s recent version. www.masseriapalazzi.it. Il Bruch della Vigilia di Natale è solo da Yogi. A good match might support dating the painting to a particular year. He wished to send a collection of paintings, books and manuscripts to his former school in Berlin, the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, that the pupils there should know something of life and opportunity in the Venetian Republic. The area around the church, at the far western tip of the city, has been continuously expanded and repurposed and now provides docks for arriving cruise ships and associated service organisations, including the port authority. People. Restaurant. 1,783 likes. If Canaletto decided he needed a moon to light the dark shoreline, or if his client had requested a moon, he would naturally have endeavoured to make it artistically successful. Subscribe today for your bi-weekly dose of inspiration. And even then, the moon is far from full, and sits much higher in the sky. But why depict San Biagio in a painting celebrating La sagra di Santa Marta? But this time, the full moon lies to the extreme right of the composition, apparently in the skies above the distant Alps. This would make more logical sense — the painting would then be depicting the Santa Marta area itself — and it also accounts for the clear line of sight to San Giorgio in Alga. Ripetute sull'erba del campo di mt.1000. 405 visits. It is by Gaspare Diziani (1689–1767), a contemporary of Canaletto better known for painting religious and allegorical subjects than vedute or “reportorial views”[1]. Can we use lunar position and phase to help date them? It is identified in the literature as depicting buildings on the island of Giudecca on the left, with the boats setting sail to head into the lagoon to the northwest. Log in to USEUM to download unlimited free images, send e-cards and interact with thousands of famous paintings, drawings and illustrations. San Giorgio Jonico, Puglia, Italy 74027. In Canaletto’s painting, a full moon hangs in the sky above San Giorgio, slightly to the left. Facebook is showing information to help you better understand the purpose of a Page. The photo below shows the remaining deconsecrated building of Santa Marta, looking along Calle Dietro Ai Magazzini (roughly meaning “alley behind the warehouses”, which tells you pretty much everything): We had to “walk” along the line from the painting’s viewpoint towards San Giorgio in order to obtain a clear line of sight: From there, it’s easy to explore the moon position using augmented reality in The Photographer’s Ephemeris to see if there are any likely matches. The orange line that bisects it represents +6° above the horizon (remember, we’re looking for around +7°). What if, for example, the moon on the night had been hanging in the sky above Santa Marta itself? If we’re looking at buildings on Giudecca, then the church cannot be Santa Marta but must be San Biagio. The bearing from our viewpoint to the island is ~245°. Page Transparency See More. He did make sketches, and some sketches of Santa Marta survive, but they are studies of the buildings on the right of the painting, indicating position, heights, colours, and materials. Is it somewhere on Dorsoduro or San Marco, on the other side of the Giudecca Canal? Here’s where the Moon would have appeared at around 2am (Venetian clocks would likely have been set a few minutes different to today): The moon is indeed mostly full (waxing, 94% illuminated), but it is around 13 degrees farther to the south than the position depicted in the painting.